Written by
Alex
Date Published
27 June 2025
As AI becomes increasingly embedded in creative industries, many businesses are questioning what role human creativity still plays in design, branding, and communication. Creative Director, Alex, explores the relationship between creativity and AI, arguing that while AI can accelerate production and idea generation, human intuition, emotion, and sensory understanding remain essential to creating meaningful connection.
‘Negative space’ in visual communication is defined as “the empty space around and between the subject of an image or design”. It’s as old as visual communication itself. Today, what isn’t there is just as illustrative and poignant as ‘what is’.
This phenomena exists in every form of communication we use, for example:
What ’isn’t said’ can speak louder than the contents of an entire speech.
The absence of an individual can be felt more than if they attended at all.
We as humans perceive both absence and presence equally, shaping our reality… or should that be ‘our dataset’?
AI is a genius. It reacts instantly without tiring, delivers eagerly and confidently without question, even offering further options and support should we want them. But it does so in a digital world, blinkered by the bounds of the request and data we supply it, it doesn’t act without us and has no sense for whether its response has ‘something missing’. Why would it? AI assimilated our prompt and proposed the best solution from the parameters, logic and data it has access to. Like following a recipe, it’s added the ingredients in the correct ratio and sequence, but when it offers a sample spoonful it’s us that decides ‘something’s missing’...
The Italians amongst us may yell ‘Amore!’ to this analogy, which isn’t far off the mark. The answer really is that little bit of human sensing. We rely on our senses, they gave us sentience which pushed our survival instincts into hyper-drive. Our connection to feeling and understanding is so hardcoded into our existence that we describe something as ‘making sense’ when something is worth doing. We are a complex mix of logic and feeling. We have a conscious and subconscious, we use intuition to drive success and sometimes make quantum leaps by being counter intuitive. Whether logical or not, we use our 5 senses and feelings to inform our decisions.
We didn’t get here relying solely on logic. Our rise has been driven by using every sense we have to learn and adapt, working together increased our survival rates and development speed taking us from weak individual primates to the dominant community species on the planet. Capable of space travel and building electronic brains that deburden our time. AI is the digital embodiment of ourselves, thirst to learn and produce but it can’t sense, see the gap, hear the silence nor feel absence.
AI is a tool we should all embrace to streamline our workflows so we can focus on what we do best: Creating connection and stimulating senses. The businesses and individuals who embrace this will produce the most valuable work.
In design, what you leave out is often just as powerful as what you put in.
Yes, when used in the wrong way. If a business relies solely on AI to generate brand assets and messaging, the content will soon start to sound generic and predictable. Uniqueness is what makes a brand powerful, and original creativity is where AI fails. For admin, structuring, and analysing tasks, AI can help. For design, ideas and original thought, humans are best.
AI is incredibly fast with data, but it operates purely on logic. What it doesn't have is intuition or feeling. Human creatives can look at a design and feel when 'something is missing'. AI can't. When you want to create something that connects with humans, these human traits are the ones that will make design resonate.
AI should act as an assistant, completing the repetitive, manual tasks to free you up so you have more time for creativity. For example, it can be used to review large amounts of data, analyse client briefs, execute repetitive image editing, and create initial prototypes and visualisation. Every business will have different ways of getting the most out of it. The important bit is recognising where your people need to take over.
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